Evolución servicios Supervigilancia en Colombia

The welfare housing period that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s provides the organisational setting for the research question. This is the period in which the Housing Commission stopped building large estates and developed new asset policies; began to house more and more very low income households, experiencing many other forms of disadvantage; and the staff experienced new difficulties in managing the provision of rental housing to this changing group of tenant households. The research question takes as its starting point the experience of the staff in this new context. It asks ‘How did housing workers and managers, employed to deliver new kinds of public housing services, deal with and experience major changes to long–established policies and practices?

The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, it establishes a framework for analysing the way in which housing workers and managers work in a state service delivery agency where policy and practices were changing rapidly. In other words, we need to be clear about the approach that will be taken to understanding the changing life world of managers and workers who design and provide services to tenants. Second, the chapter presents the framework used in getting to know, observe and record the changing life world of managers and workers. The Office of Housing is a large agency measured in terms of size of budget, employment, assets, service delivery to tenants and geographic dispersal of this service delivery. It is therefore important to be clear about how it is to be researched.

The framework presented in this chapter for analysing the way in which housing workers and managers work in a large state service delivery agency has two parts. It has two parts because it is important that our research gaze can encompass the way in which individual workers and managers act but within the context of a large agency within the Australian state that is a part of a larger policy process. They are the social constructionist approach to understanding human agency; and human agency within the ‘organisational’

context. The social constructionist approach to understanding human agency is important because ultimately it is the things people do and say day–to–day that shapes social and economic life. This is as relevant in providing housing services as it is all other spheres of society. The ‘organisational’ context idea is important because there are patterns and power relations in the things that people do and say day–to–day. The idea of ‘organisations’ is a way of comprehending particular codified patterns of human activity.

The framework used to get to know, observe and record the ‘organisation’ in this research has three key elements. First, the research required the researcher, me, to become a part of the day–to–day life world of public housing service delivery. This involves not just formal permission but the establishing of durable trust relations with workers and managers in the Office of Housing. Second, the research requires clarity about how we come to know what it is that people do and say as they go about planning and providing housing services. This requires clarity about how we capture day–to–day interactions, the stories that people tell and the documents they write. Third, the ‘organisation’ has a geography. At the most basic level workers and managers work in a number of offices spread across the state. It is important that there was sufficient coverage of these different sites to ensure that the research results are generalisable at the agency level. Of course, these offices in different places are distinguished by titles that indicate the imbricated nature of the organisation’s spatial and power relations.

Social constructionism

The choice of social constructivism as the theoretical framework was, to some degree, an easy one. Grounded theory, sociological positivism, critical discourse analysis and a number of alternative approaches would have worked quite well but my reason for drawing on social constructivism was informed by a simple remark about epistemology. Early in my reading I came across a statement about the ontological characteristics of nominalism: ‘we cannot really know or represent “reality” directly because our understanding of it is mediated by the constructs of our consciousness’ (Morrow and Brown, 1994. pg 54). This was exactly what I was aiming to do: explore the way in which Office of Housing housing managers and workers constructed their life world by hearing their stories and reading their texts, and through this learn about the way they understood their agency in relation to other workers and managers.

A social constructivist framework enabled me to do this. For a start, those who work within a social constructivist frame want to understand how individuals construct their reality, to explore how groups communicate, to capture day–to– day interactions in order to examine how people negotiate and construct shared views and perspectives in broader context. In other words, the focus is on human activities and the way in which they then reproduce broader institutions and societal structures. Giddens explains it like this:

Structure is both the medium and the outcome of the human activities which it recursively organises. Institutions, or large–scale societies, have structural properties in virtue of the continuity of the actions of their competent members. But those members of society are only able to carry out their day–to–day activities in virtue of their capacity of instantiating those structural properties (Giddens, 1987 p. 61)

Giddens simple statement is about the duality of structure, an idea of structure referring to ‘both the medium and the outcome of the human activities which it recursively organises’. It eloquently provides guidance about how the complex and intertwined processes of service provision in a large hierarchical state authority can be understood. It does this by directing attention to the day–to– day activities of managers and workers in this setting and analysing them at two levels. On the one hand, there are the directly observed actions of managers and workers and their texts that can be described in simple terms. On the other hand, their day–to–day work is undertaken in a context, which has a set of ‘structural properties’. Of course these structural properties are not immediately apparent and have to be discovered through analysis of the actions of managers and workers and their texts.

This duality of structure idea can be illustrated by referring to the way in which vacant public housing is allocated to new tenants. This is routinely done by housing officers in a local housing office, whose job it is to allocate vacant dwellings. They have in front of them a short list of vacant properties and a long list of applicants who have already been judged eligible through a centralised rule–bound application process. They also have in front of them the lengthy and well–thumbed Allocations Manual, which is there to guide their decisions about which applicants come off the waiting lists and become public housing tenants and which house they move into.

Observations, their stories and notated copies of the Allocation Manual reveal the duality of structure in the way they do their jobs. Broadly, what can be observed is that housing officers ‘comply’ with the provisions of the manual. However, it is apparent that there are competing and conflicting interpretations of the provisions by housing officers. A reasonable interpretation of what underlies these competing and conflicting interpretations is: on one hand, the use of scarce housing resources ‘structural property’ driven by the idea of housing the greatest number of applicants; and on the other hand, meeting the assessed housing needs of applicants ‘structural property’. All this takes place in a context where timeliness is a key performance indicator of the allocation of scarce state resources.

Social constructionism and organisations

Already in the discussion of social constructionism it is evident that what housing managers and workers do on a day–to–day basis and is the focus of the research can be better understood by using the duality of structure concept. However, it is also evident that the idea of the ‘structural properties’ in this day– to–day work cannot be fully understood unless the relationships between the immediate work group or team and others that are out of sight in other offices are recognised. This can be done by clearly recognising the ‘organisation’ as a larger unit of analysis. There is another reason for this approach. Brown– Saracino et.al argued that recognising the larger institution is important because ‘organisations, communities and other collective actors are more than the sum total of the interactions that comprise them’ (Brown–Saracino, 2008). The idea of ‘organisations’ is a way of comprehending particular codified patterns of human interactions at a larger scale. This is important for this research because, as has been shown in Chapter One, there has been a long history of codified human activity that initiated and developed a system for building, resourcing, maintaining and allocating dwellings to low–income households.

The most common approach in the discussion of organisations is to reify them in a way that ascribes to them simple goals and person–like status. In this way people speak of ‘the organisation’, ‘the Commission’ and ‘the Office of Housing’ as an entity that has its own identity, agency and clearly stated goals. A formal organisation chart with clear reporting structures often accompanies this type of

organisational discussion. The charts map the divisions, branches and bureaus and the way in which they relate to each other. At a more detailed level there will be the documentation that specifies job roles and reporting arrangements. Linking this there will be mission statements, descriptions of organisational targets and ways measuring performance against targets through the use of key performance indicators.

This approach to understanding organisations is reflected in much organisational and especially management literature. For example, Carl ‘Max’ Weber devised what he called an 'ideal type' of management bureaucracy. These were organisations with elaborate hierarchical structures that served to divide up the labour of the workplace by rigid enforcement of explicit rules (that were formally and consistently applied) (Weber, 1968). Weber’s ‘ideal bureaucracy’ would staffed by full–time, life–long, professionals, who do not ‘own’ the 'means of administration', or their jobs, or the sources of their funds (in other words, the means of production). Instead, staff would receive a predetermined annual salary, which would not come from the income/profit derived directly from the performance of their job. The above characteristics include many features found in the ‘modern public service’ and large ‘private industries’ that are staffed by salaried professionals. The work of other organisational theorists (such as Robbins and Barnwell) attempts to understand the nature of organisations by constructing typographies to categorise the different roles and functions for members of these organisations (Barnwell and Robbins, 2006). Further, much of this literature evaluates and discusses the best ways of designing organisations and measuring organisational performance.

This is one way of representing organisations and does describe a key feature of contemporary society which, as Galbraith (1983) observed, had become an ‘organisational society’. He was making the point that formal organisations, with goals, internal formal structures of divisions, branches and bureaus, targets and performance indicators were defining features of contemporary society. However, Galbraith’s description of a key feature of contemporary society should not obscure another feature of life within these organisations. Organisations exist, but it should not be assumed that: there is consensus around goals; reporting and communication follows formal arrangements; and targets and use of indicators are uniformly pursued (Galbraith, 1983). The

extent to which there is consensus, formal reporting arrangements followed and targets pursued is ultimately feature of an organisational life that can only be understood through knowing about what happens in formal organisations. Another way of making this point is to recognise that the setting of goals, reporting relationships and formulation of performance indicators is the outcome of manager’s work.

This approach to understanding formal organisations, which on the one hand recognises their ontological presence while on the other hand acknowledges a level of precariousness, can be illustrated by referring again to the way in which vacant public housing is allocated to new tenants. In the discussion of social constructionism above, I noted competing and conflicting interpretations of the rules guiding allocation of properties by officers at the local level. When this same process is analysed against the background of the Office of Housing as a formal organisation, other key features and tensions in the allocation process becomes apparent. Performance at the local level focuses on individual housing service officers who are assessed using a ‘timely allocation’ of property key performance indicators. However, in the budget and strategy part of the organisation, assessment of performance is different. Here the focus is on the system and the reconciliation of this indicator with many other indicators, including rent income, vacancy rates and ‘responsible allocation’, which focuses on the match between dwelling and household size. Further, in this part of the organisation, there was constant review of performance indicators and changes in emphasis about priorities.

Access to the organisation

In order to foreground the ‘duality of structure’ mentioned earlier, I employed a number of well–recognised and tested ethnographic practices. The data was gathered using semi–structured interviews, participant observation and document analysis. One of the strengths of an ethnographic approach is that the depth of enquiry and richness of data produces ‘thick descriptions’ of the social practices and interactions described in the earlier part of this chapter (Geertz, 1973). In this sense, my research offers ‘an ethnography of housing’, making visible the service work carried out in three dimensions: longitudinally (over time), geographically (at different locations) and operationally (examining different roles, positions and functions). By spending twelve months observing people with different roles and statuses, in a range of social groups and at

various office locations, I captured both the directly observed actions of managers and workers and their texts and the structural context in which these actions occur.

Ethnographic research is a risky undertaking for any organisation because sending a relatively unsupervised researcher into the workplace for an extended period and allowing them unfettered access to staff can lead to the discovery of events, attitudes and observations that might otherwise remain ‘invisible’. As a result, the initial process of negotiation was time–consuming and delicate. I experienced a number of ‘false starts’. Two locations were assessed by head office as ‘not the most appropriate’. One location was considered not representative as it had too many high–rise buildings and another local office was unavailable as the manager had recently retired. ‘Too stable, too boring’, ‘going through a difficult period with staffing problems that do not accurately characterise the whole of the state’ and ‘head office agrees, but the local manager thinks that the staff would find it too much of an intrusion’ were some of the reasons for the early exclusion of particular sites.

Gaining access to the field was further complicated by the implementation of the Housing Office Review. At the time of commencing my research in 2005, reform to staff structures, salary scales, job classification and general conditions were subject to difficult and sensitive negotiation between the union and the Office of Housing. My contacts at head office believed that a poor selection of field location could impact negatively on these negotiations. When I finally arrived at my first field location, participants never mentioned these negotiations and to date I have yet to ascertain what these ‘negative impacts’ might have been. It would appear that these concerns were limited to a small number of managers at head office and were anticipated issues, not actual ones. Silverman refers to these early negotiations as ‘trading with the gatekeepers’ (Silverman, 2000): in order to gain access to a site, the researcher must understand the role that organisational actors may and actually do perform in facilitating access. It is at this stage that the roles seem to be reversed, the observer becomes the observed as managers seek to determine if, and to what extent, they can trust the researcher. For me, it was quickly apparent that the gatekeepers at the Office of Housing were concerned with three things: maintaining involvement in the process of research (not the product), ensuring anonymity for participants (themselves included) and

reducing the impact of an inquisitive outsider intruding on a workplace already under pressure. But, after some weeks of negotiations, ethics approval and many cups of coffee, a fieldwork plan was established:

The field locations

Location one: Local office in the Western Suburbs.

The first location is a formerly prosperous industrial area of Melbourne. This area of Victoria was once thriving; home to large factories, rail freight yards, market gardens and smaller industries providing steady work for semi–skilled employees. It was home to the ‘working poor’ as it offered low cost housing, seemingly endless vacant land and had a plentiful and diverse employment market. Today this area is home to shopping malls, discount stores, numerous non–government agencies, second–hand stores and many empty, older shops. The Office of Housing is important to this area and all of the local ‘Commission’ offices have a long history of providing accommodation for the people in ‘the West’. The Office of Housing is by far the single largest low cost housing provider in the region. Most of the staff in my ‘home’ office (the one in which I spent most time) drive to work from outside the area, but some staff grew up in ‘Commission’ houses in local neighbourhoods and recall a time before ‘chronic unemployment, mental illness and single mothers’. The office seems a little too large, it has numerous empty desks from ‘better times’ and is structured in a manner that definitively separates the 30 (or so) staff from the customers.

Location two: Regional office in the Western Suburbs.

The second location accommodates housing workers with wider, non– operational responsibilities; staffing, training, performance management and special projects. The Regional Office is considered by most housing services officers (HSOs) to be the ‘middle man’, a place where the dictums from head office are re–interpreted, filtered or enforced. It also presents as a security– conscious workplace; prior to arriving, the significance of locks, doors and codes was explained to me by a number of HSO’s in location one. A large part

Location One: Local Office in Western Suburbs of Melbourne Location Two: Regional Office in Western Suburbs of Melbourne Location Three: Head Office at 555 Collins Street. Melbourne Non–Location Specific: Housing Support Coordinators – State–wide

of this security consciousness stems from the fact that the building is home to a number of service providers: housing, school nurses, child protection and a number of other agencies. Some of the staff at regional office had previously